


wish geometry

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Immortal Scully, iwtb era, lowkey violent accident, suicide mentions & half-hearted attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 21:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5841376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she wants him to kill her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wish geometry

he can deny her nothing; when she asks him to kill her, over coffee at their kitchen table, he agrees. 

they were testing out the ends of middle age when she’d made a confession. “i don’t think i can die,” she’d told him, half-drunk on cheap white wine. “i think it’s like groundhog day. they beat me, they kill me, but i just keep coming back for more.”

he’d almost laughed, recalled bill murray’s easy explanation of his seemingly endless, albeit repetitive life (i am god). he’d quipped andie macdowell’s line at her: “scully, my love, you are a lot of things, but you are not god.”

she was something though, she was something otherworldly, and if he’d known the answers he’d sought were imbedded in her veins, pumped out in her steady heartbeat, he never would have gone looking in the first place. two weeks later, in the soft snow morning of early december, she cries, sober, against his chest on their couch and won’t tell him why.

“do you remember the mushroom field?” she asks, swiping at her eyes. he thinks about the bodies they’d found, side-by-side, curled close together, curved to fill the shape of a heart. but perhaps he’d been romanticizing it, in poetry they’d call that wish geometry.

he tells her he remembers. she says she’ll never forget. it sounds like a challenge.

and so it is not that he is a willing participant in the scientific experiment she calls her life. it’s not that he wants to, or that his hand doesn’t shake and he doesn’t cry and beg her not to make him. it’s not that he didn’t consider not loading the gun.

it is subtler, his acquiescence. it’s in the way she’d looked at him, sharp and cutting and utterly unafraid when he’d caught her in their bathroom kissing the barrel of her .357 magnum.

her name had been a half-hiss on his lips. he’d grabbed her wrist so hard that the gun had hit the tile and there’d been a ring around her fragile radius like a handcuff. the gun made a dull thud against the floor, a long dead thing. she did not look away from him; she did not offer any explanations. _i wouldn’t let her_ , he’d once promised a ghost who’d teased with talks of scully’s suicide. _i wouldn’t let her_.

\--------

here is the half-truth of it: she does not want to die. 

this is the closest thing to an apology she offers him that night. with her head pressing gently against his shoulder and her cold hand slipping up under the hem of his t-shirt, she whispers it:

"i don't want to die, mulder. i don't want you to be afraid of that."

those were two statements that were wildly at odds with one another, he thinks. he is always afraid, constantly afraid. afraid _for_ her in the oily black grasp of nightmares, or when she comes home late from work without a phone call, and afraid _of_ her sometimes, too.

it’s when she throws him an opalescent smile after muttering a decidedly unprofessional joke, tells him she loves him, tries to blow her own brains out over the white porcelain sink in their pottery-barn/yard-sale/mismatched bathroom. those times he is afraid of this dark-eyed scully who loves him despite her own logic, who can look him in the eyes as he wrenches the barrel of a gun away from lips she’d pressed gently over the scar on his shoulder a hundred times while muttering _sorry i shot you, does it ever hurt?_

"mulder?" she whispers, her words threading through their dark bedroom and catching on shadows. he thinks she starts to say she's sorry, but she bites the words off before they become a lie. she has an unerring sense of truth, of integrity, that she has very rarely lost (except, sometimes, in the face of congressional judges where the sick thought of risking her partner’s safety won out over the idea of being held in contempt, where she’d sniff and close her smart mouth like a trap, acutely aware of some implicit oath she had taken, much stronger than the one she’d sworn to over the bible).

she is sorry that she hurt him, scared him, made him question everything he knew about her. she is not sorry for what she'd almost done.

she runs her hand up his side. he feels her breath against the thoracic vertebrae of his spine. “will you look at me?”

he blows out a breath. “it’s dark, scully.”

 “please.”

earlier, in the threshold of the bathroom with the gun lying still on the tile behind them, he’d held her arms by her sides, fought the urge to shake her. he’d wanted to ask that laundry list of questions they hand you in grade school before sending you out to interview your parents about the latest neighborhood happenings like a juvenile reporter. who, what, where, when, why. he’d wanted to ask how she could she have kissed him before he left for a run and then calmly watched her own face in the mirror as she prepared to take her own life, the same one he’d saved a hundred times over. he wanted to ask why, why, why would she do this to him to herself to them? he wanted to ask who she was, because he wasn’t sure he knew.

“please,” she’d said, before he could get anything out. her eyes were pale and focused on his face. “let’s discuss this later.” 

he’d watched her pick up the gun and lock it back into the safe in the closet. she’d worked on her laptop in the living room. they’d eaten dinner in silence. he’d watched her like she was a subtle, lethal thing.

he turns towards her in bed, unable or unwilling to refuse her something so simple as facing her when she asks him to. “what?” he says, and it comes out harder than he means it.

she looks up at him, searching, untethered by the way he’s kept his hands in the open space between them rather than on her waist. “i had to know, mulder,” she whispers. “i have to know.”  
  
 “know what?”

“if it’s true.”

“you were never the cryptic one, scully, tell me what you mean.”  
  
he remembers again, obliquely and out of context, crouching over her on the floor of a haunted house, asking her what she’d done.

“what do you know about immortality?” her eyes are darting, flinty in the half-light. if he squints he could pretend he doesn’t know her. she is a murky figure, breathing against his chest. shadow scully, familiar with the underworld.

“in greek mythology,” he starts, his mind catching like a dirty record.

“in life,” she whispers.

“oh,” he says. she grips his hand like an iron lifeline.  

\--------

it was almost spring, she tells him, which in west virginia means mostly winter. there were flowers on the side of the road, and the dirty snow at the base of the daffodils had turned red where she touched it.

it had been too pretty to seem real.

the truck that had hit her (side-swiped, really. it had been early, half-fog and morning light filtering in cold between the empty trees. her sneakers had beat out an easy rhythm on the dirt path near the highway. there was no one around, the roads flat and empty. she’d left a warm space next to him in bed) had been real as anything, though. virginia plates, hard steel grate in front like a gaping mouth, wheels big enough to -- she lifts her arms to demonstrate the enormity and he pushes them gently back down to her sides, nursing horror in the back of his throat like cough syrup gone down the wrong way, too sweet.

so it had hit her, the truck. came out of nowhere in the five a.m. haze and knocked her halfway across the street, all ragdoll arms and legs, and she’d been bleeding, she’d broken her neck in at least two places and she’d been dead, she must have been dead, should have been dead but --

“stop,” mulder says now. “stop, scully. stop.”

but she doesn’t. she tells him by the time she’d limped back to their remote farmhouse the drips of blood in the snow, slipping down the side of her cheek, had slowed to nothing. she'd run a hand across her forehead and her fingers came away clean. she should have been a storyteller, her voice is hypnotic. he presses their tangled hands against his chest like he’s trying to hold something in place.

she’d showered, stared at her own raw face in the mirror: high cheekbones, freckles thrown haphazardly across the bridge of her nose, lines around her eyes like animal tracks in new snow that she would pretend were from laughter but weren’t, really.

 “so,” she says, matter-of-fact, his hard-headed, steel-tongued scientist to the last, “that’s when i knew.”

he remembers that morning: she’d crawled back into bed with him, after her run, smelling like shampoo and vanilla soap and the cool morning air. the branches of her collarbone shone pale pearl silver in the light that slid under the curtains in their bedroom. she’d left bruises on his neck and shoulder. he’d kissed her jaw and joked about how she always went unscarred.

scully, he says, not sure how he means it, scully, scully.

sorry, she mutters and there’s a fault-line slipping into her voice. i’m so sorry, so sorry.

that morning she’d kissed him, cliché, like there was no tomorrow. or maybe that wasn’t it. she’d kissed him like there were too many of them, like she could see her tomorrows stretched out ahead of her, rows and rows, a monotonous game of dominos that no one was having fun playing.  
  
that morning she’d listened to the steady half-skip beat of his heart and tried to slow hers to match. outside it had begun snowing again: weary, sober flakes that seemed to beg permission before falling, melting, thin and black and tired, onto the ground.

\--------

to be continued


End file.
